When you don't know what you're looking for precisely enough to formulate a full-text search, you can browse through lists of tiddlers. Let's take a look at the available options. All of these are found under the More tab of the sidebar.

All

As the name suggest, this tab lists all of your tiddlers in alphabetical order.

Recent

This tab lists the most recent 100 tiddlers you've edited in reverse chronological order (the number is adjustable in the Control Panel at Settings > TiddlyWiki > Recent Tab Limit). This is exactly the same view that's on the Recent tab.

Tags

This tab shows tag pills for all of the tiddlers in your wiki that are used to tag at least one other tiddler. Clicking on a tag pill pops open the tag menu, allowing you to navigate to the tag tiddler itself or any of the tiddlers it is tagging.

Missing

This tab lists all tiddlers in your wiki that have been linked to by at least one other tiddler, but don't yet exist. You can click on a missing tiddler to see a menu much like that for a tag, with the missing tiddler listed at the top and all the tiddlers that link to it underneath. (We discussed this view previously in the Knowledge Tiddlers section.)

Drafts

When you edit a tiddler in TiddlyWiki, the original tiddler is preserved as-is, while a new “draft” tiddler is created to house your changes. When you accept the changes with the confirm changes button , the draft replaces the original tiddler.

The drafts tab shows any drafts that currently exist. Typically, all draft tiddlers will be open already (since you're editing them), so you'll have little reason to come in here, but occasionally a crash or network issue could cause drafts to be left in the wiki but not saved, in which case you can look for them here so you can finish your edits.

Orphans

This tab shows tiddlers that have not been linked to within the text field of any other tiddler. If your wiki relies heavily on linking for relating ideas, looking for orphans periodically can help you identify which tiddlers are at risk of getting lost.

Types

This tab lists tiddlers that aren't of a standard text type, such as images or PDFs. We'll talk more about those in Images and Attachments.

Plugins

This tab lists all plugin tiddlers that you've installed in the wiki, split into three categories, Languages, Plugins, and Themes. If you are ever unsure how to use a plugin, you can likely find its documentation or a link to it by opening its tiddler here.

If you're following along in your own wiki, you'll notice that we skipped System, Shadows, and Explorer. Understanding what these do requires knowing about some internals of TiddlyWiki we haven't covered yet, so we'll come back to these tabs later (in the System Tiddlers and Shadow Tiddlers sections).

Managing Open Tiddlers

There's one more piece to cover here – the Open tab of the sidebar. As the name suggests, it shows you at a glance all the tiddlers that are currently open in the story river. You can close or jump to an open tiddler by clicking on the button or the link, respectively.

The Open tab has another trick that's difficult to replicate any other way, and unfortunately it's the least discoverable: you can drag and drop the tiddlers in the list to change the order they appear in the story river.

Why is that important? Imagine you're working on a tiddler and you have eight more open above it, and you realize you need to pull up another tiddler as a reference. When you open a tiddler by searching or clicking in the sidebar, it'll open at the top of the story river. If you didn't have the option to reorder, you would now have to repeatedly scroll through eight unrelated tiddlers, or close them all even though you weren't ready to, just to move back and forth between them!

Another way to see several related tiddlers at once is to choose the Open in new window option under the more menu of a tiddler in view mode (you can't edit a tiddler in a new window, unfortunately).

If you find yourself doing this often, there's a nifty plugin available as part of Stroll that adds a second column to the story river so you can move tiddlers side by side. But if you only need this occasionally, the additional complexity might not be worth it.

Exercises

Takeaways

Takeaways are not available in the static version of Grok TiddlyWiki. Visit the wiki version of this page to study takeaways.